Skepticism

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We know the movie sucks

A few months ago, I saw the movie, What the bleep do we know? at the library. I checked it out. I thought it might be worth dissecting for a blog post. I watched it. I wanted to lie down afterwards and pour lye in my ear until it dribbled out my eye sockets, just to scour the stupidity out of my brain. It’s this horrible pseudo-profundity delivered by quacks, gladhanding physicists who think being in a movie makes them rockstars, and a dead Atlantean warrior, all stitched together with a boring plot about a deaf photographer searching for meaning in her life. The whole thing was so dreary and superficial that I couldn’t work up the energy to even complain about it, and did my best to forget it.

I have relatives who loved it, talked about all the “scientists” on it as proof that it’s true.

I read somewhere that there’s only one legit scientist in it, and he has since stated that he was edited horribly and his views totally misrepresented – and that the rest of the people are were passed off as scientists but they were actually laypeople who were members of a certain cult that funded the movie.

I just cringe when I hear my relatives spout the most insane supernatural bullshit, and then come out with “quantum physics proves it!”

The cult it’s propaganda for is the one run by J Z Knight, who appears in the movie supposedly channeling “Ramtha” the Atlantean. The guy who financed the movie is one of Knight’s chief disciples and the first sequence shot for the movie was a full daylong interview with J Z and “Ramtha.” To me the most interesting point was that none of the leading proponents of
the quantum-theory-explains-paranormal-phenomena crowd like Fritjof Capra were interviewed for the movie, though a Jungian analyst working on his PhD in physics and an anesthesiologist who claims to be an authority on “Consciousness” were trotted out as “experts.”

I haven’t see the movie. But I used to live in Yelm WA where JZ Knight has her compound. Her compound borders Ft. Lewis and sometimes the Ramtha followers would wander around the woods blindfolded and get lost. Fun and hijinks would ensue when they wandered onto Ft. Lewis and into bivuoac sites where Army units where conducting field training exercises.

and a shame, since actually understanding the more profound aspects of quantum physics really can alter one’s perception of what is ‘real.’

but in this movie, they took that premise and turned it to mush.

the first half is basically a bunch of people spouting sound bites that sound intriguing, but only in a ‘i can’t wait till the intro is over so they can really get to the meat of this stuff’ kind of way. only it’s not the intro. it’s the first half of the movie, which half, once you parse what they’re getting at, is simply saying: ‘what we’re saying is not simply that thinking happy thoughts will make you happy.’

and then the second half of the movie is all about how thinking happy thoughts makes you happy.

which, you know, i don’t have a problem with. you could do worse in life than to think happy thoughts.

but what an awful movie, and what an idiotic, simplistic, new-agey bullshit reading of quantum physics.

I saw this movie a few weeks ago on the recommendation of a friends daughter, who thought is was really good… (!! – we had words with her afterwards :-))

That friend, her husband, my wife and I went to see it without knowing what it was about. It kind of started off ok, and then went off into the weeds rather rapidly. By the end of it we were laughing at just about every scene. The bit about random number generators was particularly cringemaking for me.

There was one rather cool part, though. There’s a scene near the end in which one of the characters is seen walking into a movie theater – starting from the outside and walking all the way into the auditorium. Thing is, the featured theater (The Bagdad pub in north Portland) was the one we were sitting in at the time watching the movie. Made it a rather surreal experience.

I’m not sure if you know this, but there exist natural homeopathic cures for new age poisoning! Just get a copy of “What the bleep do we know!” and watch 1/10^2000th of it! You could write a computer program to do this. Just have it show one pixel of the film for about a nanosecond. This tiny dosage will counteract the effects of the film. Like cures like!

I wanted to lie down afterwards and pour lye in my ear until it dribbled out my eye sockets, just to scour the stupidity out of my brain.

Uh… yeah. Pretty much.

Speaking of Berkeley… I was there for an interview a couple months ago, and the strangest thing happened. I was at the grocery store with the guy I was staying with and a completely random woman walks up to me and asks, “Have you seen What the bleep Do We Know?! I had seen it (see PZ’s quote above) but was so surprised by this confrontation I completely forgot I had. She went on to tell me with a huge smile that it was a perfectly enlightening experience and that I should see it because it would blow away my perception of the world! (!!!) and then she turned and walked away.

Is this normal behavior for people in Berkeley? Because I am going to school there next semester, and coming from North Carolina, I don’t want to have some kind of crazy hippie overload because I am unprepared for this kind of flakey thing to happen all the time.

(No offense to the clearly normal and brilliant people there, of course. UNC has crazies too, but they are mostly fundies.)

Yeah, I saw it at the theater with some friends. They thought it was really good. I felt bad telling them about the problems with the movie. It seems to me that it appeals most to non-science people who have vague spiritual beliefs.

BTW, did you hear that back in 2003, James Randi offered the JREF $1 million prize if Emoto could reproduce his water-crystal claims in a double-blind study? Haven’t heard anything about Emoto taking up the challenge. What a surprise.http://www.randi.org/jr/052303.html

When it came out, some students saw it and tried to get me interested in going. When I realized JZ Knight and Deepockets Chopra were both involved in it, I avoided it like the plague.

Then this fall one of my honors students, an otherwise sensible young woman, pounced on my casual mention of quantum mechanics and asked if I had seen the movie. I said no, and tried to explain why. Ever the argumentative type, she challenged my objections with, “well, how do you know if you’ve never seen it?” So, I relented and we watched part of it during one our next double periods.

I had more fun watching the full-length version of “Heaven’s Gate.” No, actually, I take that back. WTB was actually funny, in a way, since it was just so plain wrong, and not just about physics. And our watching it offered me a few teaching moments, too.

The rest of the class was suitably unimpressed by the flick, so I really just have to work on the one girl. We cover QM briefly later this month, so I hope to revisit the fallacies of the movie’s conclusions.

That one is sitting in a Netflix envelope on the shelf right now waiting to be watched. I’m sure it’s a load of crap, but ALL of my students seem to have seen it, so I feel the need to address it explicitly in my Quantum Physics for Poets class.

It’s worth pointing out that some of the people interviewed for the film were very unhappy with it and say that they were taken out of context.

That sounds about right. It’s an extremely deceptive movie – it jumps around between some perfectly reasonable physics (which it manages to explain quite well) and total quackery. The way that it jumps between them seems intended to leave the impression that they’re somehow related, and that’s precisely why those not familiar with physics are likely to be taken in by it.

Hey, don’t assume the “gladhandling physicists” in that movie were representatives of physicists.

One of the more respectable sounding physicists in the movie was Fred Alan Wolfe — a guy one of whose books was a really sad joke among my friends in a second-year modern physics class back in college. The guy’s completely a nut, and he was the *most* mainstream of the “physicists” they had talking in that movie.

I know you aren’t a physicist and don’t know physics, so it sounds like physicists are just stupid for what they say in that movie– but those weren’t “real” physicists in that movie.

Rob Knop: I read your comment with great sympathetic concern. I too am worried that PZ Meyers is lumping alll physicists together, making it sound like all physicists are just stupid based on a movie that he watched. I am pretty concerned. It is pretty worrisome. People might get the wrong idea. I am, frankly, not very worried about myself since I know better, but I am worried about my well-intentioned but somewhat uninformed neighbor who is, I think, prone to getting the wrong idea, coming to the wrong conclusion. Thank you for submitting your clarification. PZ says that he is a very fair, judicious, informed and logical person–he has recently declared his wisdom in his method of voting on tenure, in fact–so I am sure his reassurances will come as a cool hand to your fevered brow. Enlightenment is on the march!

OK, physicists are not, as a rule, stupid. What is truly amazing, though — considering what one must pass to be graduated a physicist — is that any are stupid. Furthermore, for any field similarly rigorous where you know enough participants, you certainly know some of them you would identify as stupid, too. The fraction of any identifiable group who are stupid has been hypothesized to be a constant, å.

Looking at the movie site besides Ramtha’s School of Enlightenment also the Institute of Noetic Science is an interested party as well as the magic water company. Among the “scientists” hired are parapsychologists, new age quantum consciousness weirdos, a director of a Maharishi institute (Hagelin), and the author of “Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth” (Satinover) which is a religious writ on why homosexuality is voluntary and immoral.

It’s the kind of movie that gives you warm feelings about the sum total of humanity, not.

There was one rather cool part, though. There’s a scene near the end in which one of the characters is seen walking into a movie theater – starting from the outside and walking all the way into the auditorium. Thing is, the featured theater (The Bagdad pub in north Portland) was the one we were sitting in at the time watching the movie.

That’s weird – because when I saw it in South Bend, Indiana, the theater was the one that we were sitting in…

Why would anyone think I believe all physicists are stupid? There are a bunch of fringie lunatics who call themselves physicists in that movie, along with a few who, I suspect, signed on on the basis of their egos. I do not think they are representative of physicists as a whole.

I don’t believe anyone else has mentioned this, but there’s another one coming. What the bleep: Down the Rabbit Hole.
Somehow I get the sense that it will be more of the same.
What’s fascinating to me is that I have not met a teacher yet who actually likes the movie.

Adam Ierymenko: Homeopathic movies, eh? What a great idea! I’ll have to make use of those later …

Incidentally, this movie reinforced my view of some more moderate religious organizations, like the one my parents belong to. They tell me a bunch of their coattenders were talking about the merits of this movie … This illustrates the thesis that extreme open mindedness is as dangerous as rigid closed mindedness.

That’s a good sense to have. From what I’ve read, it’s mostly going to be material from the interviews for the first movies that they didn’t use. That means that the one physicist that didn’t agree with the first movie’s conclusions gets to be in the second one anyway!

Based on the small and biased sample set of people who I went to school with, a degree in physics, or two, or even three, in no way guarantees that the holder is not a whackjob. A fair number of my colleagues held pseudoscientific beliefs. Some even held beliefs which directly contradict the laws of physics which they learned. Somehow, they just don’t see the connection between, say, vitalistic theories of medicine and quantum mechanics; they definately don’t understand how the latter not only does not support the former, but directly contradict them. The people I work with now almost all have advanced degrees in science or engineering, but leave their standards of data and evidence at the door when they leave the office. The problem as I see it is that physics programs are not good at teaching critical thinking skills and how to avoid logical fallacies. Or maybe that was just my alma mater.

No programs are good at teaching critical thinking skills and how to avoid logical fallacies.

People are taught that the rules of rationality are just an arbitrary game that are applied to specific, limited circumstances and not to others. This kind of thinking is encouraged because it permits people not to be forced to acknowledge that their religions are wrong.

A Critical Thinking class, taught by a trained critical thinker rather than a gym teacher, should be the first course required in high school and mandatory for all college freshman. Of course, the result would be a mass uprising by newagers and fundies, but that would provide a rich mine of material for the courses before they were discontinued and the teachers fired.

I saw P.Z.’s article last night and couldn’t resist gleefully reading it aloud to my wife and a friend… only to realize that the friend was not taking it well. (She loved the movie, and I got to hear about all the “intense energy” you can just feel around Mayan pyramids.)

I managed to stop at “pour lye into my ear until it dribbled out my eye sockets,” converting the comma into a full stop on the fly, and stopping just short of “to scour the stupidity out of my brain.” Some tiny vestigal social sense kicked in, I guess, such that I aborted my favorite sentence in mid-delivery.

P.Z., don’t you know I have no self-control or independent volition anymore? If you write such compelling bits, they should be labeled NSFC—Not Safe For Company—or I’ll just blurt them to whoever’s around.

My backstory is that I saw only the first half of Bleep; at that point, I laughed and my liquefied brain came out my nose.

The best reference information on the What The Bleep Movie, including a critical look at factual statements and the “experts” appearing can be found (where else) on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_bleep

Finally watched it, and it was worse than I imagined. It wasn’t just bad, it was bad and UNINTERESTING. What a confused pile of crap. It’s not even worth showing to my physics class for the purpose of mockery.

Maybe I’ll try to get my hands on that “Mindwalk” film from the early 90’s instead…. anybody remember THAT one?

This may have been mentioned as I haven’t gone through all of the comments but there is a part two coming out soon. I wonder if they will be able to score Carot Top for the starring role. I feel that would give it the air of legitimacy it is striving for.

> She loved the movie, and I got to hear about all the “intense energy” you can just feel around Mayan pyramids.

Reminds me of an interview I heard with a couple of pranksters who went around making crop-circles. They would sometimes go back to the crop circle and talk with the “psychics” who showed up there. It was pretty funny to hear these New-Agey people talk sincerely about the mystical energy that they could feel in the human-created crop circle.

Here’s the real kicker for why we shouldn’t trust anything JZ knight has to say: per Wikipedia she claims “Ramtha was a Lemurian warrior who raised an army and fought against the tyrants of the times, the Atlatians, over 35,000 years ago.”. Bah! Everyone knows it was the Lemurians who were the tyrants, and the Atlantians who were peaceful and spiritually advanced. F(*&%ing revisionist historians… ;-)

I first heard of “What the Bleep” from a friend, a (now) retired middle school science teacher, in the same conversation in which she recommended that I read “Icons of Evolution.” (It opened her eyes about evolution, she said.)

I went so far as to look the movie up online and scan the description. That was enough for me.

The sad thing is that I had called my friend to ask whether her school district (in Colorado) was facing any challenges when they taught evolution.

Up to now, I’ve successfully avoided seeing this movie. I’m now thinking that I might be obligated to see it as part of my ongoing research in popular stupidology. Sooner or later, somebody who knows about my physics background is going to ask me about it, and if I tell them it’s crap but haven’t seen it, they’re going to say I’m just being closed-minded.

“I don’t believe anyone else has mentioned this, but there’s another one coming. What the bleep: Down the Rabbit Hole.”

Ironic, I’m afraid you’re right, “Down the Rabbit Hole” is indeed more of the same. The latest movie features Lynne McTaggart, someone notorious on this side of the Atlantic for her mangled logic and heated conspiracy theories about how evil doctors and modern medicine are killing us all. eg:

Unfortunately, this mess is deeply pernicious. Like the movies, it give a superficial “Sciencey” sounding authority to trap the unwary whilst being deeply confused. The problem with McTaggart is that she has used these sort of bullshit arguments to rubbish real advances in public health such as vaccination.

Even critical thinking courses have trouble with two things, according to the literature. One is transferrence – students have a hard time applying the material in other contexts and courses. A second is that the students tend to get very good at finding fallacies and errors in the work of others but less in their own. It is not (as far as I know) known how to improve these situations.